Marching Home
by Sakura Tsukikage
Summary: Roy finds himself not quite on the other side but in some familiar company nonetheless.


Disclaimer: It all belongs to Hiromu Arakawa, Square Enix, and other assorted individuals, none of whom are my humble self.

**Marching Home**

Pain.

It blazed through him like a brushfire, catching at his nerve endings and the synapses in his brain and setting them alight. His mind was like thick, black mud. He couldn't even remember his own name.

A second later it occurred to him that he couldn't breathe, and a thread of panic twisted its way through the pain-dark shadows. It gave strength to a body torn to helplessness, and he jerked to life, still fighting and with his mind telling him there was something there he should fear.

He rolled onto his side, his body curling in upon itself, and the one hand that still obeyed him swiped at his face, coming away cold and slick with something wet and viscous and slimy. The feeling terrified him for a moment before he realized it was nothing but stickily slick mud. Pain sparked through him at the touch of his hand to the skin of his face and he was too far gone to discern where it came from, but he managed to push the mud away from his eyes and nose and mouth. It smeared over his skin, cold against the unnatural heat that seemed to be burning him away from the inside out. He moaned and tried to think but came up with nothing but pain. His head hurt.

He didn't know how he managed to push himself up to his hands and knees when his muscles were quivering jelly. He could never remember crawling out of the ditch in which he'd found himself, could remember nothing but the metallic scent of blood and the squelching chill of mud against his palms. His own blood, or someone else's? He moaned again, he could feel it rasping in his throat, and he realized he couldn't hear the pained sound, couldn't hear anything at all over the ringing in his ears. Was he dead? What had happened? Had he won? Was the—the Führer, the . . . thing . . . was it dead? Had he killed it? He had, hadn't he? He thought he remembered that. What was he doing here? There was no answer to the questions, pressing as they were.

The next thing he knew was the jolt as his body gave out beneath him and he collapsed unceremoniously to the muddy ground. The scent of blood mingled with the smell of ash and scorched flesh in his nose, and his stomach heaved.

He must have blacked out, then, for the next thing he remembered was the touch of a rough, callused hand to the raw, hot skin of his face and an impossibly familiar voice saying his name. He shook his head, or tried to—the last thing he needed was to start hallucinating now. Or was hearing things just a mark of how close he was to death? "Roy," the voice said again, ignoring his desperate wishes for it to go away, to stop teasing him with this strange combination of despair and hope. Roy thought he should have expected his protests to be ignored.

"I'm not dead yet," he protested, or thought he did. He wasn't sure if his mouth actually moved to form the words or not.

The other seemed to understand him perfectly well, however. "Nah," came that voice. "Not yet. But you will be, if you keep this up. You've gotta get out of here."

Roy's hands clenched into fists in impotent frustration. Mud squelched through his fingers. "I can't," he whispered. After all, he didn't even know where he was. "What's the point?"

"Bullshit," responded that too familiar voice. "If you die on me now I'm never forgiving you. Now come on, get up."

Roy struggled to raise his head, but his efforts were in vain, for his vision was blurred and wouldn't focus. All he could see was a blur of color that might have been the pale skin of a face and the blue of a military uniform above him. He thought he could see the sun—sun? What sun?—glinting off something that could have been glasses but might just as well have been gold braiding or merely his own feverish imagination. "I'm losing my mind," he forced out miserably.

"Hey, hey, hey, none of that." One of those rough hands gripped his shoulder, the other moved to support his head. "You always did give up too easily on the big things. You're not dead yet, and you're not crazy, all right? One thing at a time—up to your knees first."

Roy's hand, trembling so violently he could barely lift it, closed over those fingers on his cheek. They felt real enough, warm and smeared with the mud covering him, dusted with coarse hairs and scarred across the knobby knuckles. Despite the apparition's reassuring words, he was obviously a few lines short of an array, but Roy couldn't find it in himself to care in that moment. He'd suspected he was losing it for a while now, anyway. "I told you, Mäes," he managed, giving in and addressing the hallucination by name. "I can't."

"And _I _told _you_ that's bullshit," the hallucination replied. His impossibly real hand moved slowly across Roy's face, brushing more of the cold, clinging slime of the mud away, and it hurt as the callused skin rubbed against Roy's painfully raw skin—he must have been seared by the flames he'd called up, Roy thought, and then that the practical thought was ridiculous in the midst of what was so clearly a hallucination. "I know you, Roy Mustang," the hallucination continued, "and you're going to become Führer, remember? You can't die here."

"I don't care anymore," Roy mumbled. "Why fight it?"

That familiar hand cuffed him lightly across the face. "You are such a bastard," Hughes said conversationally as Roy wavered and almost fell, from shock more than the surge of pain. "You don't think anyone would miss you? You're being a selfish ass."

"I _am _a selfish ass," Roy protested feebly.

"Oh, come on, we both know that's a lie. Remember who you're talking to. Besides, who's going to take care of Gracia and Elysia if you die here? You promised me, Roy."

"That's not fair."

"Since when did fighting fair get anyone anywhere?" Hughes's voice was sunnily inexorable. Roy could hear the smile in it.

"Damn you, Mäes," Roy muttered, but he dragged himself obediently up to his hands and knees nonetheless. His teeth clenched at the pain.

"That's more like it," Hughes said. His hands slid under Roy's shoulders, steadying him against the black despair more than any physical hurt. "You're a mess, you know that?"

"Damn you to hell," Roy gritted out. Hughes' hand on his shoulder was sending white-hot agony sparking through him anew, and he feared he was going to black out all over again, but as if Hughes had somehow sensed that the hand moved away from the injured shoulder.

"There's the Roy Mustang I know."

Roy took a deep breath and winced as it scraped his throat. "Help me up?"

"Sorry," Hughes said, and his voice was sad and serious. "I really am sorry, but this's the best I can do for you right now. You know I'll do whatever I can, but you have to get up on your own."

Somewhere in Roy's dazed and dizzy mind that made a bizarre sort of sense—the other man was only a hallucination, after all—and he accepted Hughes' answer without further argument. "Just like you," he said, "not to let me die in peace."

It was a tremendous, agonizing effort to wrench himself up to his feet, and Roy had the vague feeling that it should have been impossible, but somehow with his dead friend beside him a small miracle seemed within his power. As he wavered and shook, close to falling all over again, the taller man slid a surprisingly substantial arm around Roy's waist and tugged him close just in time to keep him from overbalancing and collapsing back to the ground in an ignominious heap. Roy's sore cheek came to rest against the scratchy gold braid on the shoulder of Hughes' uniform jacket. It smelled just the same as his friend always had—like the bay rum aftershave he wore for Gracia when he remembered and the starch in his uniform and soap and sweat and the particular smell that was his alone, the smell that meant this was Mäes Hughes and no one else, the smell that Roy had never really noticed until he realized it was gone forever.

"I missed you," Roy choked out into the shoulder of the jacket, and he thought he'd never have been able to say it if he hadn't been drained and battered until there was nothing left.

"I know," Hughes said against his hair. He sighed, and Roy could feel it against him, feel the slight movement of the other man's breathing. This felt too real to be a dream, but what else could it be? His face hurt. His eye hurt, blinding agonizing pain stabbing back into his head. Could you hurt this much in a dream? Even a dying fever dream? "I didn't want to die, you know," Hughes continued. "It was a mistake. Hell, just look at all the trouble you've gotten into without me here to look after you."

"Thanks a lot," Roy muttered. "Do you think I go around trying to get myself blown up?"

"The thought did cross my mind. What made you decide to be a hero, huh?"

"You weren't . . . here to stop me . . . . I'm going . . . to be Führer, remember?"

"Great!" The sudden cheerfulness in Hughes' voice was startling. "Glad we got that cleared up. You've got to be alive to be Führer, you know, so we'd better do something about getting you out of here."

"Thought you couldn't help me?" Roy asked, raising his head slightly. Pain spiked through his brain at the movement, and he groaned.

"Ah, but you're standing on your own two feet now, aren't you?" Hughes moved the hand not engaged in supporting Roy to run it over his injured shoulder, feeling carefully around it. Roy sucked in his breath at the sudden pain but shook his head at Hughes' quiet apology. "It'll be just like old times," Hughes continued. "Sorry again, but this is gonna hurt, so hold on tight and don't black out on me now."

Roy obeyed without protest. He clenched his less injured hand in Hughes' jacket and held his breath as Hughes' hands pulled on his wrist and pushed on his shoulder at the same time. For a moment everything went white and hot and bright with pain, before the brilliance of the agony faded to dark stars dancing in front of his vision and then to nothing. Roy swallowed hard and clenched his fingers in Hughes' jacket, and the other man held him steady until the faintness and pain ebbed.

"I didn't black out," Roy said, breathless and dizzy, and Hughes laughed, the sound so achingly familiar it hurt worse than the dislocated shoulder.

"No," he said, "you didn't. What the hell have you been doing to yourself, anyway? That should be a little better, but don't try anything fancy with that arm for a while."

"I'm not stupid, you know," Roy said. His voice sounded weary. He rested his sweaty forehead against Hughes' shoulder and closed his eyes. Someone had to do it, he thought, and Fullmetal was busy, but wasn't sure if he said it out loud.

"Stupid, no. Reckless, yes." Hughes replaced his arm around Roy's waist. "And you did." A moment passed, and then he said, "All right, come on. I'm getting out of here, and you're coming with me."

No matter how he struggled to later, Roy could never remember the walk that followed. He could recall nothing but the smallest details—Hughes' arm had been solid and reassuring against his back, his shoulders strong and warm under Roy's good arm where Hughes had draped it over them, and the hallucination talked to him the whole time, about inconsequential things, about earth-shatteringly important things, about everything Hughes would have wanted to know if he'd still been alive, which was everything. He'd asked Roy questions, he could remember that, but the words themselves and his responses were lost to the nowhere and nothing of space and time where they had found themselves. The next thing he could remember with any clarity was them coming to a stop and Hughes letting Roy's arm drop down from his shoulders, back to his side. Darkness in the vague shape of a gate that loomed far above their heads swam in front of him, and he turned his eyes away because they wouldn't focus on it and he didn't like not being able to see it properly. Was it him, or was it the gate itself? He wasn't sure, and he didn't like that, either.

"Well," Hughes said. "We're here. You'll be all right now. Go home, Roy. People are waiting for you."

Roy shook his head. "You can't just leave me here, Mäes," he said. "Please." The words tumbled out of him without his permission, aching in his throat. These were the words he'd never spoken, the words he'd been howling inside at the funeral but unable to say, words there was no real point in saying but ones he'd needed to say nonetheless.

"You know I wouldn't if I had a choice," Hughes said.

And he did know. If he hadn't known that so completely it wouldn't have hurt so much. The pain and the hurt and the loss and the guilt blossomed into fire, dancing along his veins and licking at his heart and scorching his nerve endings with strengthening, comforting anger. "How could you have been so stupid?" he demanded. He could feel his hands clench and twist in the rough wool of Hughes's uniform jacket, and his own voice sounded scratchy and broken and raw, weaving and cracking like that of an adolescent. "Why weren't you more careful? How could you have done that to Gracia, to Elysia? To _me_, damn it, how could you have done that to _me_?"

"Roy," came Hughes's voice, gentle and sad. His hands braced Roy's shoulders. "Roy, there's nothing—"

Roy ignored him. He seemed to have no control over his mouth, or perhaps it was that his brain simply wasn't involved and the words were going straight from his heart to his lips. "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me what was going on? Why didn't you ask me for help? I would've—I would've done any—why didn't you come to me, Mäes, _why_, damn it?" The anger went flat and left him and he nearly fell, nearly collapsed, he would have done if Hughes hadn't been there, holding him steady.

"Because of this," Hughes said. "Because you would have been a hero, Roy, and how would that have helped anyone? They'd have killed you."

Roy choked on what had to be a sob. His voice was wild and raw when he spoke, scratched out of him with broken glass. "Better me than you," he said. His breath came in heaving gasps, and his cheeks felt suddenly wet. "B-better me than you. Who really gives a shit about me? You had a family, Mäes, you had everything to live for, and you threw it all away for—" he took a deep, shaking breath "—me?" His voice was really trembling now, shattering, he could hear it, hear the tears, wet and thick in his words, feel himself trying to swallow against the sobs, trying to sniff them back and failing, the tear-tracks cold on his raw, mud-slick cheeks. Pathetic, but he couldn't stop it now, and he was past caring.

"Not just for you, idiot," Hughes said. "For Gracia, for Elysia, for Ed and Al Elric. For all of Amestris, because people deserve a chance to choose their own paths. And yes, Roy, for you, because no matter what you think, you're worthy of it all. And I'd do it again if I had to, understand?" His voice got louder, his hands tightened on Roy's arms. "I'd do it all again, you moron, because you're the best damn friend I've ever had; I don't know why you can't get that through your head. And you deserve half a chance at happiness, and you have people who give a shit about you, and even if you do try to kill yourself again by being a hero, I'll just save you myself or get someone else to do it, so you might as well give up and live, all right?"

The tears were still trickling down his cheeks, and his head hurt with a hot heavy sort of pain, and he could barely swallow. "'m not a hero," he mumbled. "I'm not, I . . . I failed, Mäes. It wasn't enough. I . . . I should have done more."

"You're an idiot, that's what you are," Hughes said, his voice warm and rough with affection. His arm tightened around Roy's back, pulling him close in a tight, clumsy hug. "Of course it was enough. You'll see." Roy started to shake his head, to try to pull away and dredge up more of his anger, but Hughes wouldn't let him, his arm strong and unshakeable at his back, and then he was collapsing against his friend's shoulder, and he let the tears come. He felt like a sniveling child, but Hughes was _gone_, and he could have prevented it, he could have prevented so many things, but he hadn't.

"I miss you too, Roy," Hughes said. His hand was soft but solid against Roy's hair. "I miss you, and I'm sorry."

It was what he'd needed him to say, but it didn't help, didn't solve anything, because nothing would, anymore, and that wasn't the point, anyway. He closed his eyes and let his forehead rest against the shoulder of a hallucination that felt more real than his reality, and clenched his fingers in the nonexistent cloth of his best friend's nonexistent uniform jacket because this uniform would have been buried in the grave with him, wouldn't it, because every Amestrian officer was buried in his or her dress blues, and it would have started rotting away by now, and let the tears really come, not just because his best and oldest friend was dead, but because of too many things to count, because he'd failed himself and those he cared for and what was important one too many times to forgive himself for it, and because he was tired, and alone, and because he didn't know how to go forward anymore, and he just wanted someone to carry him those last few steps over the threshold he couldn't figure out how to walk for himself.

He woke up at the soft touch of a hand to his, and the whisper of long hair across the edges of skin, and an achingly familiar perfume mingling with the scent of disinfectant in the air. "Riza," he whispered, and his lips felt dry and painful.

"Sir," she said.

"I'm alive?" The question felt necessary, even though he was certain of the answer now.

"You're alive, sir." And he heard, _you came back to me_.

"I had help," he sighed. "Riza," he said again. Her hand was cool and strong and capable in his, and he closed his fingers on hers, and he slept.


End file.
